“The extremists [among the settlers] are getting stronger. . . . The struggle is moving towards militancy.”
The secure phone rang in Rabin’s apartment at a few minutes after six, an inauspicious start to the morning of February 25, 1994. The prime minister had returned the previous day from a trip to Spain and Portugal, the first official visit by an Israeli leader to each of the two countries. He had been in a reflective mood on the way home, chatting with journalists on the plane about the months that had passed since the signing in Washington. Countries that had shunned Israel were now seeking a role in the peace process and inquiring about investments. The Tel Aviv Stock Exchange had soared since September, gaining more than 80 percent in value. Negotiations over the ground-level details of Arafat’s rule in Gaza and Jericho were finally close to conclusion. Only the violence marred the process. Palestinians had killed twenty-one Israelis in the preceding six months, nearly one a week—a painful toll that was steadily eroding support for peacemaking. Israeli troops had killed a similar number of Palestinians in military operations, a violent cycle Rabin hoped Arafat could arrest once he took control of the territory. For the time being, the Palestinian leader remained in Tunis.
The secure line had two extensions in the apartment, one in the kitchen and another in the den. Predictably, the phones in both rooms were red. They linked Rabin with a small number of other top officials, including the chiefs of Mossad and Shabak. In the years Rabin had been defense minister in the 1980s and now prime minister, he came to recognize the ring as a harbinger of bad news.
He picked up the receiver and heard the raspy voice of his military secretary, Danny Yatom. He was calling from Hebron in the West Bank, a Palestinian city with a combustible set of ingredients—a religious population that identified largely with Hamas, a small but exceedingly radical settler community living in the very heart of the Arab populace, and a shrine, the Cave of the Patriarchs, that was sacred to both groups, the Muslims and the Jews. Yatom got right to the point: a Jewish settler committed a horrible massacre at the shrine earlier in the morning, he told his boss.
Friday mornings were usually reserved for meetings with defense officials, including a weekly forum Rabin convened with the heads of the intelligence agencies and the chief of staff. It was his favorite part of the week. Though a quarter century had elapsed since Rabin shed his military uniform, he still found himself more comfortable with soldiers than politicians—and more trusting of them. Only Yatom took notes at these meetings and nothing ever leaked.
On this Friday, Hebron scrambled Rabin’s agenda and instantly plunged his eighteen-month-old administration into crisis.
Though the city was only about fifty miles southeast of Tel Aviv, it could not have been more different from the freewheeling Israeli metropolis on the Mediterranean. Gray and cold, with a population of 130,000 Palestinians, Hebron was the largest city in the West Bank, an urban clutter of winding streets and stone bazaars laid out over a series of rocky hills. It boasted a university, two hospitals, and two rundown hotels but, in keeping with the conservative spirit of the city, not a single movie theater. The shrine, a towering Herodian structure set in the center of Hebron, was its showpiece—and also its curse, a pilgrimage site fought over for thousands of years.
The shrine derived its sanctity from the Book of Genesis, which recounts how Abraham bought the cave from a certain Ephron the Hittite (for “four hundred shekels of silver”) as a burial site for his wife, Sarah. Eventually, Abraham is interred alongside his wife and later other Hebrew patriarchs and matriarchs are buried there as well—Isaac, Jacob, Rebecca, and Leah. Over the centuries, the appeal of this Old Testament narrative to all three monotheistic religions made the cave a trophy for competing empires. It served as a Jewish shrine under Herod the Great, who surrounded it with huge stone walls, a basilica in the Byzantine era, and a mosque after the invasion of the Muslims. The Crusaders made a church of the site in 1100 but it reverted to a mosque when Saladin conquered the area in 1188.
By the early twentieth century the Cave of the Patriarchs and the city around it were one more flashpoint for the rivaling Jewish and Arab nationalist movements. In 1929, Palestinians killed scores of Jews there in a rampage fueled by false rumors that Jews were killing Arabs in Jerusalem. The massacre effectively ended centuries of Jewish presence in the city. Thirty-eight years later, when Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War brought the West Bank under Israeli rule and unleashed a messianic fervor among religious Jews, the first place these Jews pushed to colonize was Hebron. They formed a settlement adjacent to the city in the late 1960s known as Kiryat Arba and a settler community inside Hebron itself in 1979.
Yatom had boarded a helicopter for the city as soon as he got word of the shooting. At the site, he received a briefing from military commanders and relayed the information to Rabin. The Israeli who committed the massacre, Baruch Goldstein, entered the shrine around five in the morning dressed in the army uniform he kept as a reservist and carrying a military-issue assault rifle. At the top of the stairs, he pushed past the worship area designated for Jews and entered the Ibrahimi Mosque (Ibrahim being the Arabic name for Abraham), where hundreds of Palestinians engaged in morning prayers. Friday marked the midpoint of Ramadan, a month of daytime fasting and praying. It was also Purim, the day Jews commemorate having been saved from extermination in the ancient Persian Empire.
As the worshippers knelt and bowed to touch their foreheads to the carpet, a practice known in Arabic as sujud, Goldstein fired more than a hundred rounds from behind the crowd, spraying bullets from side to side. Throngs of people rushed the doors of the mosque, creating a bottleneck; Goldstein fired on them as well. Only after he emptied three magazines was there a pause in the shooting. While he tried to load a fourth one in his gun, one of the Palestinians struck him with a fire extinguisher and then others rushed the shooter and beat him to death. In less than two minutes, he’d managed to kill twenty-nine Palestinians and wound more than one hundred. Among the dead were eight teenagers.
The bodies were gone by the time Yatom entered the hall but the spent shells still lay scattered across the carpet. During a thirty-year military career that included a rotation as commander of Sayeret Matkal, Yatom had seen his share of carnage. The sight in the mosque rivaled the horrors he’d witnessed in battle: streaks of blood in almost every corner of the chamber, the great marble pillars of the mosque chipped and pocked, lights on the chandeliers shot out. The bag Goldstein had carried into the mosque still had a handgun in it and three fully loaded magazines. He’d brought seven in all.
Goldstein had been a thirty-eight-year-old reserve army captain and the doctor of Kiryat Arba, which by 1994 had several thousand residents. Raised in an Orthodox home in New York, he’d been active in Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defense League, a far-right group whose members engaged in both activism and vigilantism against perceived enemies of Jews or Israel. The FBI would eventually outlaw it as a terrorist organization.
He immigrated to Israel after finishing medical school in 1981, changed his name from Benjamin to Baruch, and soon came to the attention of Shabak, the internal security service that focused mostly on Palestinian insurgents but had a separate department to deal with Jewish radicals. During his military service, and later as a doctor in Kiryat Arba, Goldstein refused to treat Arabs, a position that almost got him court-martialed. While running for Kiryat Arba’s local council in 1992 as a representative of Kahane’s Kach Party, he advocated “transferring these hostile Arabs across the border.” He told a journalist that Palestinians strove to inflict a second holocaust on the Jews of Israel and that “treasonous politicians were preventing the army from operating effectively against them.”
The police had detained Goldstein several times over the years for minor offenses—knocking over a bookcase full of Korans at the Cave of the Patriarchs and circulating leaflets calling for attacks against Palestinians after Kahane was assassinated in New York (by an Egyptian American). But in the months after the signing of the Oslo deal he seemed to have come unhinged. Several of the Hamas attacks that followed the signing in Washington occurred in the Hebron area, triggering angry and sometimes violent outbursts by settlers against Palestinian bystanders. Goldstein, as the resident doctor, would often rush to the scene of these attacks to treat the wounded. The army valued his efforts so highly that a regional commander recommended promoting him to the rank of reserve major. “If there’s any officer worthy of being promoted in the Judea, Samaria and Gaza area, it is without a doubt, Dr. Baruch Goldstein,” the commander wrote just five weeks before the massacre.
Two shooting incidents in particular might have pushed him over the edge. In early November, Palestinians sprayed the car of an Orthodox rabbi much revered by the settlers, Haim Druckman, in a drive-by shooting near Hebron. A bullet struck Druckman in the arm, wounding him moderately. But his driver, Efraim Ayoubi, was hit in the chest and by the time Goldstein arrived, was barely breathing. Another Kiryat Arba settler who rushed to the scene, Eliezer Waldman, recalled years later watching Goldstein try for long minutes to resuscitate Ayoubi and then grow angry when he realized the man would not survive. “He just threw his medical bag to the ground and stormed off.”
A month later, Palestinians shot dead a father and son outside Kiryat Arba, Mordechai and Shalom Lapid. The Lapid family, with fourteen children, had been a pillar of the settler community. The funeral procession the following day drew thousands of people, including Goldstein, who joined others in a menacing chant for vengeance against Palestinians.
Rabin summoned his cabinet ministers to Tel Aviv for an emergency meeting, hoping to prevent events from cycling out of control. Already, Palestinians across the West Bank were protesting the massacre, throwing stones at soldiers and drawing fire. The day’s casualty toll would steadily climb. Arab citizens of Israel were also venting their anger, protesting around Jaffa and in a part of northern Israel where Arab towns are clustered, known as the Triangle. As the hours passed, the pressure on Arafat to respond firmly against Israel mounted. In Tunis, he announced he was suspending the Gaza-Jericho negotiations. Rabin’s realization back in September that a lone extremist could subvert the entire process with a single act of sensational carnage was materializing even before the agreement could be implemented.
At the cabinet meeting, security officials described to the attendees—some twenty of them, seated around a large wooden table—what they knew about Goldstein. Shabak had worked hard to cultivate informants in the settlements after it exposed the plot by Jewish extremists in the 1980s to blow up the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. They had been running several in Kiryat Arba. But nothing in the file the agency had on Goldstein suggested he was capable of something this extreme. Jacob Perry, who had headed Shabak since 1988, told the cabinet ministers Goldstein appeared to have plotted the massacre alone. But others in the agency, including the man in charge of tracking Jewish extremists, Hezi Kalo, suspected that he received at least tacit approval from rabbis before setting out to kill Palestinians. Though most religious settlers were law-abiding, a running concern for Shabak was that certain rabbis held more sway with the ideological core of the community than the state itself with its laws and institutions—that their theological rulings stood above the decisions of the democratically elected government. The Rabin government’s willingness to cede land to the Palestinians had put these two competing authorities, the state and the rabbis (at least a segment of them), on a collision course.
The massacre presented an opportunity to address this Kulturkampf, though it wasn’t clear to people around the table whether Rabin recognized the extent of the challenge it posed to the country’s civilian authority. His Labor Party and the people it represented—secular, largely Ashkenazi liberals—had been hegemonic through most of his lifetime. Rabin, the scion of Palmach and the army’s chief of staff during the 1967 war, was the very embodiment of Israeliness. That the settlement movement, with its redemption fixations and its rabbinical authorities, was anything more than a fringe phenomenon seemed difficult for Rabin to grasp. And yet, for years now, the tide had been shifting in their favor.
With the hours ticking down until the start of the Sabbath, the ministers made two decisions. The first was to initiate the legal procedure for outlawing Kach and its offshoot, Kahane Chai. Both groups espoused racist ideologies and preached violence against the Palestinians. Banning them would make it easier to go after their top activists, several of whom lived in Hebron and Kiryat Arba. They also decided to form a commission of inquiry to probe the circumstances of the massacre, including how Goldstein managed to get past the soldiers at the entrance to the Cave of the Patriarchs and whether new arrangements for sharing the shrine were necessary. Rabin opposed a commission. He felt its very formation would imply that the government shared the blame for the massacre. But around the table, he was outnumbered.
At some point the cabinet ministers took up a more ambitious idea: evacuating the settlers from Hebron. Some five hundred Jews lived in several enclaves of Hebron’s city center—the radical fringe of the settler population. They tangled regularly with Palestinians in the city and with Israeli soldiers as well. The army regularly stationed three battalions in Hebron to safeguard the Jews—meaning soldiers outnumbered settlers by at least two to one—a huge toll on the military. How they had come to live in the city was the story of the settler enterprise itself: They squatted there illegally and eventually won retroactive approval from authorities. Even dovish governments had a habit of yielding to the settlers, often on the heels of a Palestinian terrorist attack.
The Oslo Accord did not require Rabin to evacuate a single settlement. The fate of the 140 or so Jewish communities scattered across the West Bank and Gaza would be determined in the final negotiations between the two sides, which were set to begin in 1996. But Rabin did commit to handing Arafat control of all Palestinian cities in the West Bank in the second stage of the agreement, including Hebron. The fact that Jews lived in the heart of the city would complicate the endeavor. The massacre, which revealed to Israelis more starkly than ever the fanatic undergrowth of the settlement enterprise, seemed to offer an opportunity to dismantle the Hebron communities.
The ministers debated the idea for much of the afternoon without arriving at a decision. Hours later, Rabin raised the issue with a smaller group he convened at the Defense Ministry—Perry, Yatom, and the army’s chief of staff, Ehud Barak. But all three worried that a large-scale eviction would prompt violent confrontations with the settlers of Hebron. Perry, the Shabak chief, offered an alternative: evacuating Tel Rumeida, a single enclave isolated from the rest of the Jewish clusters in the city and home to some twenty settlers. The eviction would signal to Jewish radicals that violence, far from halting the handover of territory to Palestinians, would actually accelerate it. And it would be a message to Palestinians that Rabin intended to deal harshly with the extremists—just as he expected Arafat to do with Hamas.
Rabin seemed to like the idea. In the earlier meeting he referred to Goldstein as “Jewish Hamas.” Now he left participants with the impression that he would order the evacuation the next day.
BY SATURDAY MORNING, February 26, the full scope of the previous day’s bloodshed became clear. In addition to the slaughter at the shrine, Israeli troops had opened fire on protesters across the West Bank and Gaza, killing fourteen people and bringing the death toll to forty-three. It was the worst single-day carnage in years. The army imposed its usual closure on the territories to prevent revenge attacks and also added a curfew to the mix, confining more than 2 million Palestinians to their homes for most hours of the day and night. With anger running high in the West Bank and Gaza, Israeli authorities felt the restrictions were the only way to prevent an explosion. But to Palestinians, they compounded the injustice. The victims of the massacre were now being punished for the massacre. The curfew did not apply to settlers in the territories, including Hebron, where Jews walked around the city center freely, armed with Uzis and other automatic weapons. Palestinians could only watch from their windows and seethe.
More about Goldstein had also come to light. In the months leading up the shooting, Palestinians had complained to Israeli authorities several times about a tall bearded man named Baruch harassing worshippers at the Cave of the Patriarchs. On one occasion he poured acid on the carpets of the Ibrahimi Mosque. Police buried the complaints. Though Israeli authorities responded aggressively to any suspicion against Palestinians, they were notably slow about investigating settlers. The phenomenon had been criticized repeatedly in Israel’s own government reports. One written by Deputy Attorney General Yehudit Karp and published in 1984 cited the “ambivalence” of Israeli police officers who did not view settler violence against Palestinians as criminal in the “common definition” of the term. Karp examined seventy Palestinian complaints of attacks by settlers for the report. In fifty-three of the cases, the government took no action.
Two days before the shooting, Goldstein called his insurance agent and asked to double his life insurance policy. The night before, he penned a letter to his family—he had an Israeli-born wife and four children—saying in part that he prayed God would grant him “full redemption.” American journalists writing about Goldstein emphasized the role Americans played in the settlement enterprise, not only in Hebron but throughout the West Bank and Gaza. Though settlers made up fewer than 3 percent of Israelis, 10 percent of the settlers were American-born. The Long Island daily, Newsday, captured the phenomenon with a mordant headline: “America’s ‘Gift’ to Israel.”
Rabin read the reports about Goldstein with a sense of revulsion. He had been nursing a toothache for some days, taking antibiotics but avoiding the dentist. The pain now fused his anger at the settlers. As if the massacre weren’t appalling enough, some residents of Hebron and Kiryat Arba were now defending Goldstein, claiming his actions somehow thwarted an imminent attack on the Jews of Hebron. They based the assertion on rumors that Palestinians had been storing armaments at the shrine. Even the local council of Kiryat Arba, which included both religious and nonreligious Jews, refused to condemn the shooting. Many other right-wingers did speak out against it. But few if any entertained the possibility that Goldstein reflected a broader trend toward violence in the radical settlements. He was a lone fanatic, what Israelis referred to as an esev shoteh, a stray weed.
Rabin had an icy relationship with the settlers going back decades. The conquests of the Six-Day War had inspired a kind of rapture even among members of the Labor Party, a secular version of the messianism that infected religious Israelis. Officially, the Labor-led government stood ready to trade the territories for peace treaties with the Arab states. But some prominent Laborites, including Rabin’s former Palmach commander, Yigal Allon, quietly encouraged Israelis to settle beyond the “green line” that marked the border before the war—and not just in areas they deemed vital for Israel’s security. Eliezer Waldman, a prominent rabbi, recalled approaching Allon for help when the latter was a cabinet minister in 1968 and getting what could only be interpreted as implied consent. “He said, ‘You’re waiting for permission from the government? That’s not how Zionism works.’ ” Waldman and his wife checked into a Palestinian-owned hotel in Hebron, along with two other families, and refused to leave until the government promised to create a settlement just outside the city. Allon helped get the measure passed, giving birth to Kiryat Arba—where Baruch Goldstein would eventually make his home.
Rabin seemed to be immune to this territorial fixation (except with regards to Jerusalem’s Old City, with the Jewish shrine in its heart, the Western Wall). He had no trouble arguing that Israel needed parts of the West Bank for security, but Rabin regarded the notion that every inch of the territory was sacred as obnoxious and reckless. It threatened to turn Israel into a second Lebanon, where competing religious groups fought one another relentlessly, nearly destroying the country. In the memoir he published in 1979, Rabin wrote that the settlers had undermined Israel’s long-term well-being by deliberately planting themselves in Palestinian-populated areas. He described them as a “cancer in the body of Israeli democracy.”
The settlers came to see Rabin as a dangerous opponent, a political figure with no religious or romantic attachment to the territory they saw as sacred. Their fears about him materialized when, as prime minister in 1992, Rabin froze government housing projects in the settlements. The move would signal to the Palestinians that he intended to negotiate more earnestly than his Likud Party predecessor, Yitzhak Shamir. But it also conveyed Rabin’s determination to change Israel’s priorities—from security and settlements to infrastructure inside Israel and to education. Spending on education doubled during his first year in office. Previous governments had enticed Israelis to move to the settlements with tax breaks and lower-interest mortgages, incentives that helped swell the communities with people who sought a better standard of living, not some ideological fulfillment. Now the settlers complained that Rabin was hanging them out to dry.
To placate the settlers, Rabin appointed his deputy defense minister, Mordechai “Motta” Gur, as an informal liaison to the YESHA Council. A retired general, Gur had commanded the division that conquered Jerusalem’s Old City during the Six-Day War. The settlers viewed him as an ally in the otherwise hostile Labor Party and trusted him to notify them before the government took any significant steps regarding the West Bank and Gaza. Rabin also maintained a direct dialogue with some of the more pragmatic settler leaders. One of them, Yoel Bin-Nun, took it upon himself to explain the settler position in long, handwritten letters he sent Rabin every month or two beginning in 1992 and in occasional meetings with the prime minister. Bin-Nun had been one of the founders of the settlement Ofra and a member of the YESHA Council. A former paratrooper, he served under Gur in the battle for Jerusalem in 1967.
His letters during the first year of Rabin’s term were short and friendly enough. Bin-Nun wanted Rabin to invite the National Religious Party, a parliamentary faction that represented the mainstream of the settler movement, to join his coalition. Though he acknowledged deep ideological divisions between Labor and the NRP, Bin-Nun thought the two parties could cooperate at least until the moment negotiations with the Palestinians or Syria produced a breakthrough—a moment he doubted would come. When that endeavor failed, Bin-Nun tried to persuade Rabin to annex the main settlement blocs to Israel and to accept the position that Jordan was the real homeland of the Palestinians. “The PLO, in its current situation, might be the only group that can take control in Amman at this critical hour and stop the rise of Islam,” he wrote Rabin on September 9, 1992, suggesting that King Hussein was losing ground to Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood.
Bin-Nun also tried to defuse tensions between Rabin and the settlers, a near-impossible undertaking. Even before the Oslo Accord, settlers had taken to protesting outside Rabin’s office in Jerusalem. One of his cabinet ministers, Uzi Baram, recalled years later Rabin hearing their chants during a particular cabinet meeting, walking over to the window, and growing red with anger. More often, though, he would dismiss their rants with a downward flip of the hand.
The Oslo Accord with Arafat raised the hostility to new heights. After it was signed in Washington, Gur went to the home of YESHA Council leader Israel Harel in the settlement Ofra and got an earful. The YESHA Council had become so influential in the preceding decade that its leaders could not imagine a prime minister making sweeping decisions without consulting them first. Gur tried to reassure them by pointing out that the interim agreement did not include the uprooting of a single settlement. But this old ally of the settlers had lost his credibility. Rabin had kept the secret of Oslo from him as well.
Bin-Nun, who attended the meeting, felt betrayed by Rabin. But he also felt a need to preserve his line to Rabin in hope of minimizing the damage from the Oslo deal. Bin-Nun saw himself and the other members of the YESHA Council as moderates who had risked their own standing in the settler community by advocating dialogue with Rabin. Now he worried that he and his cohorts would lose ground to the hardliners, including the Hebronites. “In this whole process, the extremists are getting stronger, the ones who warned all along not to trust this government,” he wrote Rabin in a six-page, handwritten letter dated September 29, just sixteen days after the signing in Washington. “In a short time, if there’s no dramatic change, I will no longer be able to influence people towards moderation the way I have for years because everyone knows that nothing will come of our quiet contacts and cooperation with you. . . . The struggle is moving towards militancy and I’m not sure we’ll be able to control it.”
The warning was certainly prescient, as the Goldstein massacre would demonstrate. The Oslo deal fired up the militants on both sides. But it was also self-serving. Rabin was Israel’s democratically elected leader. He had won the election on a promise to forge peace deals between Israel and its neighbors, including the Palestinians. The settlers, by contrast, had put only a few lawmakers in parliament; a hardline list led by the Hebron rabbi Moshe Levinger drew fewer than 4,000 votes. Bin-Nun’s argument struck Rabin as a kind of extortion bid: meet the YESHA Council’s demands or contend with the violence of the extremists. As with most of Bin-Nun’s letters, he read this one personally (Bin-Nun had written at the top: “Personal—Urgent!”) but did not respond.
Bin-Nun continued to write Rabin regularly over the next two years. A letter five days after the six-page one argued that Arafat’s Fatah group had not really dropped its policy of armed struggle as promised and that its operatives in the West Bank and Gaza were working together with Hamas militants to attack Israelis. As evidence, he included photos of graffiti he spotted in Beit Hanina, a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem, where someone had scrawled: “Fatah and Hamas, together till victory.”
But while he prodded Rabin to listen more attentively to the settlers, Bin-Nun also took part in YESHA Council meetings where settler leaders plotted ways to grind down his legitimacy. In one of them sometime after the signing in Washington, the council invited psychologists and public-relations executives to strategize how to discredit Rabin personally and force him to resign. Bin-Nun recalled the discussions years later with some embarrassment. “[The idea] was to break Rabin, those around him, his legitimacy, his image. There was an orderly discussion about attacking Rabin alone. If both [Rabin and Peres] were attacked, the campaign would become diffused and Rabin would get off because public opinion would blame Peres.” The council members decided, among other things, to dispatch hecklers whenever Rabin appeared at a public event.
The decision amplified a practice already under way by rightists, who had been protesting events with the prime minister over his decision to freeze most settlement construction in the West Bank and Gaza. One such event took place at Bar-Ilan University, where in June of 1993, Rabin received an honorary doctorate along with Robert K. Lifton, president of the American Jewish Congress, and others. Rabin was meant to be the main speaker but when he stepped up to the podium, dressed in the traditional black cap and gown, protestors in the audience stood and jeered. One of the hecklers managed to tap into the public address system and cause a loud buzz whenever the prime minister leaned in to speak. Rabin waited silently while guards pulled the protestors out.
By late 1993, Rabin had had enough of the settlers. The YESHA Council was pushing for a meeting to make its case for a partial lifting of the settlement freeze—enough to accommodate what it defined as “natural growth” in its communities. But Rabin now felt the chasm was too wide to bridge, a clash over the very character of Israel. Haber, whose job as chief of staff included smoothing the wrinkles with various constituencies, pushed Rabin to meet the settlers and concede something small—agree to form a committee, say, that would study their demands. But Rabin had virtually no skills in diplomacy—he couldn’t hide his contempt. An argument erupted as soon as the settler leaders sat down.
“He couldn’t pretend he’s now friends with these people,” recalled Uri Dromi, who served as director of the Government Press Office at the time. “He felt they were undermining everything we’re trying to build.”
With all that as the backdrop, the massacre at the shrine now struck Rabin as the biggest wrecking ball his opponents had launched at the peace process yet. Goldstein wanted revenge for the bloodshed he’d seen in the preceding months. But he also aimed for something bigger—a prayer-hall slaughter so horrific that it would ignite the Arab street and turn Palestinians away from the peace deal. Hamas would surely respond in kind, souring Israelis on the process. The nihilists on both sides had a common agenda.
Rabin recognized the danger. And yet he found himself wavering about the evacuation of Tel Rumeida. Yossi Beilin, who thought the decision was all but finalized Friday night, listened to the radio throughout the weekend expecting to hear the announcement that soldiers had begun dismantling the enclave. It never came.
A STEADY RAIN fell on both sides of the green line over the following days, helping diffuse the protests in the West Bank and Gaza but not the tension. Goldstein’s family sought to bury the body in Hebron’s old Jewish cemetery on a hill surrounded by Palestinian homes, a move that would surely have provoked more friction and violence. When the army refused, settlers in Kiryat Arba cleared a section at the end of a park in their town, named, aptly, for Meir Kahane.
The funeral drew more than a thousand people, including Kach activists now fleeing arrest warrants. Baruch Marzel, who led Kach and lived in Tel Rumeida, eulogized Goldstein as “a saint, a great man who had the courage to carry out a heroic act.” Another Kach activist, Avigdor Eskin, promised to name his newborn son after the killer. Incredibly, some people held signs demanding revenge for Goldstein’s death. His family had the gravestone chiseled with the words “He gave his life for the nation of Israel, its people and its land,” and also a line from the Book of Psalms: “Clean hands and a pure heart.” With little else in the park but gravel and shrub, the stone tomb protruded from the earth like a shrine.
Rabin spoke to Arafat by phone in Tunis, laying out the measures his cabinet had enacted. In addition to outlawing Kach and Kahane Chai and starting to arrest top members of the groups, authorities had decided to ban some fifteen hard-core settlers from the West Bank and Gaza for now and to confiscate weapons from another twenty people. Rabin also informed the Palestinian leader that he would be releasing hundreds of Palestinians from prison in the coming days, a gesture that had already been agreed upon in the talks and not yet implemented.
But Arafat stood by his decision to suspend the negotiations. Though he kept the conversation polite—the two men had already met face-to-face several times since the signing in Washington—he told Rabin the measures seemed minor for such a horrific event. “Hollow and superficial,” is how he described them to a journalist later. Arafat pressed Rabin to move the hundreds of settlers from Hebron itself to Kiryat Arba less than a mile away. He also wanted an international force deployed in the city.
Whether or not to evacuate some Hebron settlers now became entwined with the very fate of the peace process. Rabin would ponder the question for weeks, with legal advisers and military officers giving him a range of opinions. The generals who ran the military, the body that would be charged with carrying out the evacuation, mostly opposed it. Dismantling Tel Rumeida alone would require several battalions in addition to the three stationed there routinely, they informed Rabin. The settlers would resist, perhaps violently. When troops evacuated the last remaining Israelis from Sinai in 1982 under a peace accord with Egypt, right-wing activists had dropped sandbags and burning tires at soldiers from rooftops, in images that Israelis found difficult to stomach. Some extremists—mostly Kach people who had moved to Sinai in the weeks leading up to the withdrawal—threatened to blow themselves up if soldiers tried to pull them out.
The specter of an armed confrontation in Hebron worried Rabin. It also stirred dark memories of the Altalena affair forty-six years earlier, a violent clash between soldiers under Rabin’s command and members of the right-wing paramilitary group known as the Irgun. The Altalena was a cargo vessel the Irgun had purchased to ship tons of weapons and ammunition from France to Israel in the weeks following independence in 1948. Though Irgun leader Menachem Begin had offered to give much of the weaponry to the newly formed Israel Defense Forces—while keeping some for Irgun battalions—Ben-Gurion had already resolved to bring all the fighting groups under a single jurisdiction. The weapons ship seemed to undermine that objective. As the Altalena drew close to Tel Aviv’s coastline, soldiers fired on it and took control of the cargo, leaving sixteen people dead. To historians, the affair marked a critical point in the provisional government’s assertion of sovereignty. But it also poisoned relations between left and right for decades to come.
Rabin’s role in the ordeal had come about by chance. He had been visiting government headquarters when the ship came in and was ordered to the beach. Though he brushed off accusations over the years that he’d been responsible for the shedding of Jewish blood, it seemed to friends that the affair left a scar. “I think the Altalena case haunted him,” recalled Amos Eiran, who had worked with Rabin at the Israeli embassy in Washington in the late 1960s. The two remained friends—and tennis partners—for decades.
Whether Rabin would face legal hurdles in seeking to dismantle Tel Rumeida was also a question. Settlers had established a presence in Hebron in 1979 with the same wildcat tactics that worked elsewhere in the West Bank, squatting in a building known as Beit Hadassah that served decades earlier as a clinic for Jews. The Israeli government at the time was initially opposed to a Jewish enclave in the city but gave its approval following a Palestinian shooting attack in Hebron. Over the years, the settlers were allowed to take over other buildings once owned by Jews and expand steadily.
The consultations in Rabin’s office ate up several hours of each day, including his birthday, March 1. He turned seventy-two in the thick of the crisis. Lawyers told Rabin that the settlers would surely challenge any evacuation order with a petition to Israel’s High Court of Justice. Though the government would cite its security needs to justify the measure, some lawyers thought the case might be difficult to win. Goldstein, after all, had lived in Kiryat Arba, not Tel Rumeida. And if the government was arguing that it could no longer protect Jews living in the heart of a hostile Palestinian city, that the military’s resources were being drained, why was it focusing on Tel Rumeida and not all the enclaves? Even Rabin’s attorney general, Michael Ben-Yair, who supported the evacuation idea, had bad news. He told Rabin the measure should rightly be submitted to parliament for approval and not just to the cabinet, a significant challenge given that Rabin controlled only a minority of the seats in the plenum.
The extended deliberation gave settler leaders and right-wing rabbis a chance to fight back. In the days after the massacre, they mounted a campaign against any change to the status quo in Hebron. The group now had no illusions about being able to sway the government. But it could certainly influence individual soldiers and officers who might be called on to evacuate settlers from their homes. Elyakim Haetzni, a lawyer and political activist who lived in Kiryat Arba, favored an approach that included both persuasion and intimidation.
A former member of parliament with the right-wing Tehiya Party, Haetzni founded the Action Center for Canceling the Autonomy Agreement soon after the signing in Washington and proceeded to issue vitriolic attacks against Rabin and the agreement. It was Haetzni who had first likened Rabin to Philippe Pétain. His slogans appeared on signs and bumper stickers throughout the country. Weeks before Goldstein mowed down Palestinians in Hebron, Haetzni published an article in the settler journal Nekuda calling for nothing short of an insurrection against the Rabin government. “A people whose government committed an act of national treason, collaborated with a terrorist enemy to steal the heart of his homeland . . . must be ready to fight. And in this war as in every other war, there are risks and casualties,” he wrote. His article also included a warning to Israeli soldiers. “An IDF soldier, though Jewish, who would pull us, our wives, our children and grandchildren from our houses and make us refugees—will, in our view, be conducting a pogrom. We shall look upon him as a violent thug acting like a Cossack.”
Two weeks after the massacre, Haetzni held a news conference to push the message further. In a hall teeming with journalists, he screened a half-hour film his Action Center had produced about a fictional battalion commander named Ron Segev struggling with the dilemma of evicting settlers from their homes. In the film, Segev consults with legal scholars and reads texts on conscientious objection. By the end, he decides to disobey the evacuation order, citing—among other things—the Oslo Accord’s provision for an armed Palestinian police force to operate in Gaza and Jericho. “If a soldier steals a few weapons and sells them to Arabs, he’s indicted,” he concludes. “But if the government does the same thing on a much larger scale, people applaud.” Haetzni announced that he was distributing several thousand copies of the film to soldiers.
Authorities paid little attention to Haetzni and his Action Center. Though inciting soldiers to revolt amounted to sedition and might well have been grounds for an indictment, it was not clear whether he had much of a following. Even in the settler milieu, he was an outlier—deeply ideological and politically extreme but not religious. His pronouncements lacked the weight of ecclesiastic authority.
But three rabbis whose opinions did matter to settlers quickly followed up with a religious ruling—one that troubled Rabin deeply. Their edict, framed as an answer to a question from a soldier, declared that it was “forbidden for a Jew to take part in any activity which aids in the evacuation [of Judea, Samaria, Gaza and the Golan].” The rabbis, Moshe-Zvi Neria, Shaul Yisraeli, and Avraham Shapira, cited the writings of the twelfth-century Torah scholar Maimonides, who said: “Even if the King orders you to violate the laws of the Torah, it is forbidden to obey.”
The ruling, posted in religious neighborhoods across the country, had no precedent. In the contest between religious and secular authorities, the army, an almost sacred institution for Israelis, had generally been spared. Now, respected rabbis were telling soldiers to ignore their chain of command and obey a different authority, a nightmare scenario for any military. The three rabbis were easily the most influential figures of the national religious camp—the term that took in not just settlers but a broad swath of observant Israelis. Shapira had been Israel’s chief Ashkenazi rabbi for a decade. If only a fraction of religious soldiers heeded the call, the army faced deep trouble. Though Israel’s combat units (which would be called on to evacuate settlers) and officer corps were traditionally filled by secular Israelis, the demographics of the army had been changing for some years. By the early 1990s, the so-called knitted skullcap soldiers were ascending in these units—a trend that would accelerate in the years to come.
By now, Rabin’s determination to confront the settlers was eroding. An expert on political extremism in Israel, Ehud Sprinzak, drafted a memorandum for the government that predicted a “high likelihood of violent confrontations with the settlers and possible Jewish fatalities” if any attempt were made to remove Jews from Hebron. Bin-Nun, the settler who corresponded with Rabin, suggested a compromise of sorts in a letter dated March 25. He asked Rabin to allocate more territory to the settlers in order to create contiguity among the Jewish enclaves of Hebron—alongside a decision to dismantle Tel Rumeida. But Bin-Nun conceded that even with that far-reaching gesture, other members of the YESHA Council would likely reject any evacuation order. “Because these ideas are unacceptable to my colleagues, I would ask that you keep them between us,” he wrote. To Rabin it was a non-starter. He had concluded long ago that allowing Jews to settle in Hebron had been a terrible mistake. Entrenching the community further—in the aftermath of a massacre a settler perpetrated against Palestinians, no less—struck him as downright perverse.
And yet, he could not bring himself to order an evacuation. In late March, Rabin dispatched Gur to Israel’s chief rabbis with the message that the Hebron settlers would not be removed. It was an admission of defeat. A month earlier the public had been outraged by Goldstein’s brutality, but the prospect of internecine violence seemed to work in the settlers’ favor. Polls now showed most Israelis opposed an evacuation. In one conducted by Yedioth Ahronoth, 18 percent of respondents—nearly one in five Israelis—thought soldiers should put the rulings of their rabbis ahead of the orders of their commanders. Fifty-two percent rejected the notion that legal measures should be taken against the three rabbis who issued the insubordination decree. Ben-Yair, the attorney general, would come to regret not ordering a police investigation against the rabbis. But at the time, he worried that religious Israelis would find the sight of three octogenarian rabbis in the dock just too upsetting. Two of the rabbis would die within eighteen months of the decree.
The Council of the Chief Rabbinate “registered with great satisfaction” the fact that the settlers would stay put. In a letter to the prime minister, the council wrote: “It is therefore clear that the question of military orders to evacuate settlers or settlements—which are against Jewish law—is not on the agenda and the army must be taken out of the political debate.”
Rabin saw the episode as a temporary retreat. A full peace agreement with the Palestinians would require the evacuation of settlers in huge numbers—not dozens but tens of thousands. In the weeks after the massacre, he concluded that it would be better to wage one big battle than several small ones. With the legal challenges and the political ordeal it entailed, evicting twenty people from Hebron could well have taken months. Rabin thought it would ultimately distract the government from more important things—like completing the Gaza-Jericho agreement and striking a peace deal with Jordan, which now seemed within reach.
For the extremists, the victory felt significant. It confirmed that the entire settler leadership would mobilize to block even the tiniest withdrawal. Rabbis could disrupt the army’s chain of command by invoking Jewish law as an authority that stood above the decisions of the elected government. If those things weren’t troubling enough, it also underscored how a lone gunman could bring the peace process to a crashing halt with just an automatic rifle and a few magazines. There was a lesson here for opponents of the process on both sides.
AT THE START of April, the crisis finally seemed to ebb. The cabinet ministers and advisers to Rabin who opposed confronting the settlers, including Haber, breathed a sigh of relief. Even the advocates of eviction were happy to forget the ordeal and move on. Arafat, who had prevented his negotiators from meeting Israelis for more than a month, finally relented, dispatching them to Cairo to make what both sides now felt were the final security arrangements ahead of Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza and Jericho and their transfer to Palestinian hands. If the teams could lock up an agreement within weeks, Arafat would relocate his headquarters to Gaza by summer. The months of violence had dimmed the enthusiasm on both sides, but the long-awaited commencement of Palestinian self-rule would be so momentous, perhaps it could erase some of the ill will.
Getting Arafat to resume the talks had involved a combination of gestures—condolences and reassurances from Rabin conveyed repeatedly by emissaries in person; Israel’s agreement to a temporary international force in Hebron—unarmed and essentially devoid of any real powers but the first introduction of foreign forces to the West Bank nonetheless; and a visit to Tunis by Dennis Ross, the White House Middle East envoy. Still eager to bond himself to the United States, Arafat viewed every meeting with senior American officials as a windfall.
Ross had been working in government on Arab-Israeli issues since the mid-1980s, but because the United States had no relations with the PLO until the Oslo Accord, American officials engaged solely with Palestinian figures in the West Bank and Gaza, not with Arafat himself. When Ross landed in Tunis, where the PLO had made its headquarters since Israel ousted Arafat from Lebanon more than a decade earlier, he was struck by the disparity between the group’s revolutionary beginnings and its staid, comfortable existence. Arafat’s aides all wore expensive suits and watches. They lived in villas in an upscale part of the city. In the waiting room outside Arafat’s office, apparatchiks sat around watching an episode of The Golden Girls, an American sitcom about four elderly women sharing a home in Miami, Florida. Ross thought of the show’s humor as typically Jewish, not what he expected PLO men to find amusing.
As signs of an early spring appeared in Israel, Rabin’s government wrapped up other matters as well. Treasury officials struck a new wage deal with university lecturers, whose strike had disrupted classes for two months. With Israel’s labor federation still wielding enormous power, strikes periodically paralyzed everything from state-run hospitals to the country’s only international airport. Police finally nabbed Baruch Marzel, the Kach leader wanted since the day of the massacre. He had been hiding at the home of another settler, Yoram Skolnick, who faced trial for shooting a Palestinian militant after he’d been subdued and tied up. For weeks, the actions of others had lunged Rabin from crisis to crisis. Now he felt himself regaining control.
But the sensation was short-lived. On April 6, exactly forty days after Goldstein’s killing spree, a nineteen-year-old Palestinian drove a car full of explosives from his town in the West Bank to Afula, a few miles across the border, and blew it up, killing eight people. Hamas, which trained and equipped the bomber, had waited until the end of the Muslim mourning period to take vengeance on Israel.
The bomber had stopped his light-blue Opel Ascona near a public bus and waited a few moments until a group of high school students drew near before detonating his load. With the blast, the front of the bus burst into flames and thousands of razor-sharp metal fragments sliced at the crowd. Though the event pre-dated camera phones, a bystander who happened to be carrying a camcorder captured much of the carnage on video. In quick, jerky pans, it showed a man whose head had been severed and survivors whose skin was charred and clothes burned off. One of the bodies at the scene belonged to the assailant; he had killed himself in the act of killing others.
The Afula bombing would come to be remembered as Hamas’s foray into suicide attacks—as the moment the group embraced the tactic in response to Goldstein’s mass murder. In truth, Hamas had launched several suicide bombers at Israeli targets over the preceding year. But while the group had confined itself mostly to assaults against soldiers and settlers in the West Bank and Gaza—attacks that usually left two or three people dead—from now on it would strike at the heart of Israel, aiming for as many civilian casualties as possible. The car bombing marked the deadliest attack by any group since 1989. Goldstein hadn’t spawned the suicide phenomenon in Hamas, but his massacre motivated the group to take it to new heights.
The bombing preceded the official start of Holocaust Memorial Day in Israel by just hours. The twenty-four-hour mourning period begins with a piercing siren heard throughout Israel and a ceremony at Yad Vashem, Jerusalem’s museum and memorial for the 6 million victims of Nazi genocide. In its early years, Israel struggled to find a fitting way to mark the Holocaust. The idea of commemorating the persecution of Jews ran against the ethos that Israel had fostered for itself as a country of citizen-warriors who would not be victimized under any circumstances. Only eight years after the end of World War II did Ben-Gurion’s government get around to establishing an official day for marking the genocide, calling it, poignantly, Yom Hashoah Ve’hagvura, “Holocaust and the Heroism Day.” It would coincide with the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, one of the war’s few instances of large-scale Jewish resistance.
Rabin spoke at the ceremony that evening but made no mention of the bombing. At the funerals for the victims the next day, crowds chased away the one Labor Party member who tried to attend. Funerals for victims of Palestinian violence often included fiery speeches and attacks on the government. In this case, the context of the bombing—that it came in response to a massacre perpetrated by a radical settler—became predictably obscured by grief and rage.
By the time Rabin convened his cabinet in the aftermath of the violence, the tension climbed even higher. A Palestinian from Gaza somehow crossed into Israel with an automatic rifle and sprayed bullets at a bus stop near the southern town of Ashdod, killing one Israeli. In Hebron, a visit by Jesse Jackson, the American minister and civil-rights activist, turned violent. Jackson had been invited to attend a PLO event in Jerusalem but Israel canceled it as part of its policy of preventing Palestinian political activity in the city. Instead, Jackson traveled to Hebron, where he led several hundred Palestinians to the Tomb of the Patriarchs for prayer.
Israel had allowed Jews to continue praying at the shrine after the massacre in February but kept Muslims away until authorities could put a new worship regime in place—adding further insult to Palestinian injury. When soldiers now blocked the group from passing, Jackson held a prayer service there at the entrance, along with a Hamas preacher, Taysir Tamimi. To the soldiers and settlers, the scene must have looked surreal, with Jackson chanting the slogan that electrified delegates at the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta six years earlier, “Keep Hope Alive,” and Palestinians echoing his words and clapping. But when Jackson got back on the bus to leave, Palestinians hurled stones at Israeli soldiers, who responded with gunfire, wounding eight of them. The clashes lasted some thirty minutes, with Palestinians at one point using Jackson’s bus for cover.
Rabin now faced questions about how Palestinian assailants were managing to get through Israeli checkpoints. The closure that the army imposed on the West Bank and Gaza after the massacre had still been in effect. Under pressure to protect Israelis from additional bombings, the cabinet decided to extend the closure indefinitely. Since the measure would harm Israeli farmers and building contractors who relied on cheap Palestinian labor for their enterprise, it also decided to offer visas for large numbers of foreign workers, mainly from Eastern Europe and the Far East. The twin decisions would cost many thousands of Palestinians their livelihood—60,000 had permits to work in Israel. In the months since the signing in Washington, a perverse reality had emerged. The process that was supposed to enhance Israeli security and give Palestinians more freedom and prosperity was undermining all three.